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Site Search Tuning

The real secret to better site search is simple.

It requires arming developers with the knowledge of those most familiar with the users – marketing, content curators, and domain experts. Flax can help you build an effective search team from across the business, develop a search strategy and tune your site search. A series of guest blog posts written by Karen Renshaw, ex-head of site search at RS Components, explain some steps you should consider when tuning site search.

Poor interaction between developers and content experts causes site search quality to slide backwards. Content experts have little insight into how or why search engines behave. Developers, on the other hand, lack understanding of what site search should do. Despite their technical expertise, they rarely have the skills to know what “relevant” means for your application and business. Tuning relevance is therefore a difficult process – fix one problem and it might have a negative affect somewhere else!

We recommend Quepid, a powerful tool for recording and displaying relevance for thousands of queries. Using this tool, content experts can show what they judge as relevant and developers can instantly view the impact of configuration changes – across the board. Quepid works with both Apache Lucene/Solr and Elasticsearch and optionally with data from your legacy search engine – allowing you to be sure that your search upgrade is performing.

Flax are the UK resellers for Quepid, built by our partners OpenSource Connections – contact us for a demo.

We are a small law firm in Woodland, California. While we try to create and maintain directory structures that make document access as painless as possible, inevitably we need to find documents by their content…

'Flax's expertise in implementing high-performance search and monitoring systems was invaluable. They delivered a component that works seamlessly with the other parts of our system and allows us to process thousands of items every day'

'The transition to Solr was the latest step in our strategy to develop a truly worldclass search application. We believe it provides a robust architecture that meets our future aims, it will scale economically and…

'Eagle has been fortunate to work with Flax on a number of occasions. Their deep knowledge and expertise in search has been invaluable, and their experience of working on real-world projects brings significant advantages. As…

We needed a new search engine to give our users better results when searching our catalogue of 250,000 products; we knew that Elasticsearch was the solution for us but complicated integrations into our site and…

'Although our requirements were not straightforward, Flax has taken on the challenge and has been key to our implementation. The team is friendly, hard working and very talented, we are happy to have chosen Flax…

'The new search engine indexes all our documents quickly and gives our users search results in less than a second. Flax’s long experience and expert knowledge of enterprise search has been invaluable – they had…

Flax have helped us at Historic England to implement and configure our new Solr/Lucene search, which was one of the main pillars of our Digital Programme. From day one we found Flax to be approachable,…

Ask us how to improve your site search

Latest Case Study

Elasticsearch for Westcoast – why search is never simple!

Elasticsearch for Westcoast from Charlie Hull

Latest White Paper

Whitepaper – Why you should be considering open source search

I’ve uploaded a whitepaper I wrote a short while ago : “In these rapidly changing times we don’t know what we will need to search tomorrow – so it’s important to be adaptable, flexible and able to cope with data … More

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